Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [109]
Knives Out
But Radiohead and Chopin break with this mundane routine. By chopping and slicing time in their music, they break us away from ordinary existence and its ordinary rhythms. They violate our temporal expectations and routine and force an awareness of time. They compel us to ask ourselves how we arrived at this particular place in our lives. For Chopin, his musical career in Paris is always framed by the remembrance of his native Warsaw and the family he left behind. With “Pyramid Song,” Radiohead forces us in two directions at once. Whether it’s a mere emphasis or a changing time signature, the song’s rhythmic qualities push us out of our normal awareness of time (one where we are barely even aware of its passing). At the same time (!), however, it invites us to a take a synoptic view of our entire life (or, at least, Thom Yorke’s life) from beginning to end:
I jumped in the river and what did I see?
. . .
All the figures I used to see
All my lovers were there with me
All my past and futures
The result is like one of Chopin’s nostalgic reflections as well as a Heideggerian moment of clarity, a flash of insight by which one sees one’s past, present, and future as an organic whole. It is an invitation to reconcile our current embodied lives with our past and the future they together will create, like a river whose parts are interconnected and moving together.
Taken seriously as a philosophical moment, the song can spark a lasting insight. To realize that our present is informed and shaped by our past is to realize a historically affected consciousness, to no longer trudge through our days without realizing these operative interconnections. As we see how the past informs our present, we also realize that our past and present are constantly shaping our future and that our plans for the future shape our present. Who we are, what we do, how we experience life is not merely a consequence of what has come before, but also of what is to come in light of our plans—themselves conditioned, and made possible (or impossible) by our pasts.
The rhythmic oddness of “Pyramid Song” is then an opportunity to become aware of temporality itself. By breaking from the regular rhythms we expect to hear in popular music, Radiohead nudges us to adopt phenomenological perspectives on time—something one must do with caution. Remembrance and recognition of our lives in the past can be painful, as it seems to be for Chopin. For others it can lead to a difficult realization about death and finitude. But Radiohead seems to offer a twist on this, as well. Perhaps echoing Talking Head’s “Heaven” (“a place where nothing, nothing ever happens”) on Fear of Music, Yorke offers a consolation for those who realize that a heaven apart from life itself may be nothing more than a fantasy island you can reach “in a little row boat.”
If so, this invites a more obvious comparison of “Pyramid Song” to Talking Head’s “Once in a Lifetime,” David Byrne and Brian Eno’s study of sudden insights about the temporality of life: “And you may ask yourself, how do I work this? / . . . how did I get here? / . . . my God, what have I done?” Both Byrne and Yorke depict time as flowing water that sustains life silently and without drawing attention to itself (Byrne’s time flows “underground”). Unlike Radiohead’s, however, Talking Heads’ song remains locked in a steady 4/4 rhythm and therefore does not use the temporality of their song to point directly at time and temporality itself.
If you can jump in the river of time and see your life in its historical embeddeness, there is nothing more outside of it:
And we all went to heaven in a little row boat
There was nothing to fear and nothing to doubt
With past, present and future united, there is no pain from